When he returned to the Court and stopped mechanically at the desk for his mail, Della, with her welcoming smile, chided him.
"My, but you look awful serious, Mr. Crocker!"
"Am I?— Yes, I suppose so," he said absent-mindedly.
He went through into the inner court that yesterday had seemed to him such a constricted little spot in the great city which had responded to his fortunate touch. Now, in the falling dusk, with the lights blossoming out, the court seemed very big, crowded with human beings in the battle of life, and he himself small and without significance.
"Well, I've gone and done it," he said to himself with a half laugh. "I wonder—"
He wondered, now that it was all over, now that the curtain had dropped on the drama of it, whether after all Drake had been right—whether he was seeing life through his emotions, and what the point of view of thirty-five and forty would be in retrospection.
"Well, I've chucked it all," he said, lingering in the quiet and the suffused half lights. "I took the bit in my teeth. There's no turning back now." He remembered his father and the old battling look of defiance in his eyes as he had exhorted his son.
"Guess, after all," he said grimly, feeling all at once drawn closer to his own, "I must be a chip of the old block."
Granning alone was in the study as he came in, spinning his hat on to the sofa.